John McAfee Plays Hide-and-Seek in Belize

John McAfee, right, a pioneer in computer security who lives in Belize, is a “person of interest” in the murder of his neighbor.Credit
Photo Illustration by The New York Times

AMBERGRIS CAYE, Belize

DANIEL GUERRERO promised during his campaign for mayor here to clean up San Pedro, the only town on this island, a 20-minute puddle jump from the mainland. But if he ever runs for re-election, don’t expect him to mention that vow.

“I meant clean up the trash, the traffic, that sort of thing,” he says. “I didn’t mean this.”

“This” is a full-blown international media frenzy and the kind of mess that no politician could have seen coming. It started on Nov. 11, the morning that Gregory Faull, a 52-year-old American, was found dead, lying face up in a pool of blood in his home. He had been shot in the head. His laptop and iPhone were missing. A 9-millimeter shell was found nearby.

What happened next turned this from a local crime story to worldwide news: The police announced that a “person of interest” in the investigation was a neighbor, John McAfee, a Silicon Valley legend who years ago earned millions from the computer virus-fighting software company that still bears his name.

A priapic 67-year-old, with an improbable mop of blond-highlighted hair and a rotating group of young girlfriends, Mr. McAfee quickly melted into the island’s lush green forest. Then, for Belizean authorities, the real embarrassment began.

Asserting his innocence, Mr. McAfee became a multiplatform cyberdissident, with a Twitter account, and a blog at whoismcafee.com with audio links, a comments section, photographs and a stream of invective against the government and the police of Belize. He has done interviews on podcasts, like the “Joe Rogan Experience,” and offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of “the person or persons” who killed Mr. Faull. He has turned lamming it into a kind of high-tech performance art.

“I am asking all people of conscience to read this blog, especially the links in the ‘Background’ section,’ and see the ugly truth unfolding here,” he posted on Nov. 18. “Speak out. Write your congressmen. Write the prime minister. Do what you can.”

Before he went underground, Mr. McAfee led a noisy, opulent and increasingly stressful life here. He was known for the retinue of prostitutes who he says moved in and out of his house, and for employing armed guards, some of whom stood watch on the beach abutting his house. He also kept a pack of untethered dogs on his property who barked at and sometimes bit passers-by.

Two days before the murder, someone had poisoned a handful of those dogs. As it happens, Mr. Faull had complained about the animals, as well as the guards and the constant late-night inflow and outflow of taxis on the dirt path that runs behind his and Mr. McAfee’s homes — a path so tiny that it’s supposed to be off-limits to cars.

Mr. Faull had shown up at the town council office a few weeks ago with a letter decrying the din and the dogs, as well as Mr. McAfee’s guns and behavior. Nothing came of it.

“We were planning to meet with John McAfee and hand him the letter,” Mr. Guerrero said. “But it never happened. We were busy doing other work.”

In hindsight, that looks like a blunder. Mr. McAfee has since said on his blog that he had no choice but to flee because police and politicians in Belize are corrupt and eager to kill him. As proof, he has written at length about a late April raid that the country’s Gang Suppression Unit conducted at a property of his on the mainland, in a district called Orange Walk.

Some McAfee watchers have a different theory — namely, that he grew paranoid and perhaps psychotic after months of experimenting with and consuming MDPV, a psychoactive drug. These experiments were described in detail by Mr. McAfee himself, under the pseudonym “Stuffmonger” in a forum on Bluelight, a Web site popular with drug hobbyists.

So, here’s one hypothesis: Rich man doses himself to madness while seeking sexual bliss through pharmacology. Then shoots neighbor in a rage. Case closed, right? Ah, but those Bluelight posts were a ruse, Mr. McAfee would later blog, just one of the many pranks he has perpetrated over the years — part of a bet with a friend to see if he could create Bluelight’s largest-ever thread.

“I am indeed that same Stuffmonger,” he posted on Nov. 20. “I, however, do not do drugs, and I am no chemist. I am, however, a practical joker who does not mind investing months in a given joking enterprise.”

Joke or not, the posts and every element of his new renegade life have gone viral. Which is to say, the guy has done it again. Throughout his varied, occasionally confounding and hoax-filled career, the one constant has been a genius for self-promotion. Little of his adult life has gone unpublicized. The current inconvenience of hiding has simply altered his stratagems and given his usual winking and mischievous tone an angry, survivalist cast.

Since disappearing, he hasn’t merely evaded police officers sent to unearth him. He has taunted them. He has contended on his blog that when the authorities searched his house in the days after the murder, he hovered nearby in preposterous-sounding disguises, including that of a drunk German tourist in a Speedo and “a distasteful, oversized Hawaiian shirt” who would yell “at anyone who would listen.” He has also said he dressed as a stooped Guatemalan peddler “in ragged brown pants,” his cheeks stuffed with chewing gum, selling wares to tourists and reporters.

If you visit Mr. McAfee’s house, the charade sounds laughable, in part because the beach is all but abandoned. Nonetheless, the contention led Foxnews.comto post this headline: “John McAfee Reveals His Secret Hiding Place: His Home.”

Mr. McAfee has also used the blog to highlight the plight of Belize’s underclass. Or, rather, a narrow niche of the underclass: the poor and fetching young women whom he has slept with — including the one who is hiding out with him now, whom he calls Sam. The blog is Amnesty International meets Hugh Hefner as played by Jean Valjean, the unfairly hounded peasant of “Les Misérables.”

Except that nobody has accused Mr. McAfee of anything, other than being “bonkers,” as the country’s prime minister, Dean Barrow, put it to a reporter when the chase began. Mayor Guerrero sounds more patient, but his idea of boosterism surely doesn’t involve a murder, followed by a manhunt for a rich, tattooed, gun-loving, harem-tending, government-hating, media-savvy gringo, a word by which Americans of all races are known here.

Mr. Guerrero has offered to accompany Mr. McAfee personally to the police station here, to allay any fears of mistreatment. It’s an offer that he believes Mr. McAfee won’t accept.

“I think he’s living a movie in his mind,” Mr. Guerrero, “and he’s enjoying the movie.”

SAN PEDRO is a kind of budget Margaritaville, with an eastern shore lined with beaches, midmarket hotels and bars where there is often basketball on television and Bon Jovi on the jukebox. With its narrow streets and tiny roundabouts, it looks like the miniature resort version of a British colony, though much of the place is a bit rickety and could use a fresh coat of paint. During the day, if you’re not in the mood to snorkel around the gorgeous coral reefs, there is no shortage of hammocks.

Most visitors are Americans who come for three or four days, but in recent years, Belize has attracted its share of people who move here to lie low, for one reason or another.

“I call it the Island of Misfit Toys,” says Eileen Jamison, behind the counter of DandE’s Frozen Custard and Sorbet. “Ever see the movie ‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?’ They stop at this Island of Misfit Toys — a doll that cried, a train with square wheels. We’ve got some misfit toys here. Weirdos.”

During a recent eight-day visit here, I tried to get in touch with Mr. McAfee, and interviewed his friends and former employees. This proved harder than it initially sounded. Many in Mr. McAfee’s circle have their own irrational fears and more than a few refused to speak for reasons that I discovered only at the end of the stay.

“The word is out there you’re with the F.B.I.,” said a man entwined in Mr. McAfee’s life, the day before I left. “Nobody believes you’re a reporter.”

It turns out that proving you are not with the F.B.I. is kind of tricky. All of my credentials suddenly looked forged, even to me. But the wariness of some locals merely reflects their fear of the authorities. Much of what Mr. McAfee has written about police misconduct rings true to a certain stratum of the populace here, and conspiracy theories are rampant. Several people say they believe that the government is pursuing Mr. McAfee because it wants to seize his property.

That seems even more absurd once you see the property. It’s five miles north of San Pedro, in a sparsely populated part of the island called Mata Grande. His villa is next to a pristine beach and a dock. A white picket fence lines the property with a sign that reads “Never Mind the Dog. Beware of Owner,” next to an image of a hand wrapped around a smoking revolver. Behind the fence is a pool, and behind the pool is a one-story, blue and white house. A number of bungalows are spread around the property, a few of them in Caribbean shades of purple and yellow. The villa, which was listed for $1.7 million when Mr. McAfee bought it, is less luxurious-looking than you might expect. The grounds are unkempt, and parts of it are under construction.

One recent afternoon, two men were there working on a new addition. They know that their boss has skedaddled but say they are still being paid by a groundskeeper.

“The dogs were buried back there,” one of the workers said, taking a quick break and pointing to a patch of ground at the rear of the property. He was referring to the poisoned dogs. Mr. McAfee wrote on his blog that he found them writhing in agony and vomiting blood and shot them to end their misery. Then he buried them. “The police came recently and dug them back up,” the worker said. “And cut their heads off.”

Presumably, the government was looking for bullets in the heads of the dogs, to compare with the bullet that killed Mr. Faull. The results of those tests have not been made public.

Mr. McAfee bought this property four years ago and, like much else about him, the reasons for his relocation, and what he was doing here, are a bit murky.

What is certain is that he bought a water taxi service and started a couple of small local businesses. The most ambitious was QuorumEx, a biotech start-up that aspired to develop natural antibiotics with plants in the Belizean rain forest.

In 2010, he told Jeff Wise, a reporter with Fast Company, that he came up with the idea after a chance meeting with Allison Adonizio, then a 31-year-old with a doctorate in ethnobotany from Florida International University, who was vacationing in Belize. She passed on a three-year research grant offered by the National Institutes for Health to lead research for QuorumEx. The idea for the company made a certain sense: a guy who had spent years fighting computer viruses turns his attention and talents to combating bacteria.

But reporters who visited Mr. McAfee had a hard time figuring out how much of the operation was authentic and how much was sleight of hand, and he seemed to relish the confusion. In Fast Company’s article, published in May 2010, Mr. Wise wrote that Mr. McAfee didn’t seem very focused on QuorumEx’s stated mission. Instead, he told the reporter, he and his colleagues were rummaging around the forest in search of an herbal version of Viagra for women.

Within a few weeks of the article’s publication, Ms. Adonizio and Mr. McAfee had a falling out. The two had made no progress with their antibiotics work, Ms. Adonizio would later tell Mr. Wise. But that was the least of it. After she broke up with her boyfriend, she told the reporter, Mr. McAfee had implied that he could have the guy killed. She said Mr. McAfee also tried to fix her up with what she described as “crazy circus folk,” apparently a reference to his friends. She says he showed her pornographic Web sites that were disturbingly kinky. When at last she said she wanted out of their business partnership, she contended that he physically lunged at her, and that she had to lock herself in a lab.

“As soon as I started questioning his motives, he turned on me and became a horrible, horrible person, controlling, manipulative and dangerous,” Ms. Adonizio told Mr. Wise, once she had returned to the United States. “I’m thankful that I got out with my life.”

Asked about all of this by Mr. Wise, Mr. McAfee said “Allison is an unhappy person who is unhappy to the core. Whatever’s on the table, she will turn it this way, that way, and make something out of it, to be the cause of her unhappiness.”

A FEW months before Ms. Adonizio left Belize, Mr. McAfee introduced himself as Stuffmonger on Bluelight. He had started a thread on the site about MDPV, one of several drugs known by the deceptively benign name of bath salts. He wrote that he wanted recreate what he called “super perv powder,” a light brown version of MDPV that he tried in 2006. The drug delivered a jolt to his nether parts that he never forgot. “I think it’s the finest drug ever conceived,” he wrote in his first Bluelight post, “not just for the indescribable hypersexuality but also for the smooth euphoria and mild comedown.”

The point of his Bluelight posts, Stuffmonger wrote, was to describe his experiments to recreate “the tan,” as he christened the drug, a slightly darker version of MDPV which he said was no longer commercially available. He hoped that others would chip in and help. To that end, his posts offer chemistry-set pointers (“If the yellow-green color happens, don’t worry, you haven’t lost anything. Add water, pour it back in the flask and heat slowly”) and warnings (“A 100 mg dose of the tan will merely guarantee fatigue and sore genitals from nonstop sex and keep you up for 24 hours max”).

The posts were accompanied by photographs of Stuffmonger’s lab, and close-up shots of powders he had created. Among other Bluelight posters, there were some skeptics, including a person who figured that Stuffmonger was shilling for a company selling MDPV. But there were true believers, too, including a guy who said he’d followed Stuffmonger’s instructions and wound up with a drug that he and his girlfriend had tried with a success that was almost frightening. The two had sex with such riotous abandon, he reported, that the next day they could hardly look at each other.

In all, Stuffmonger posted more than 200 times, and his “last activity,” according to Bluelight’s profile page, was two days before the discovery of Mr. Faull’s body.

Whether these Bluelight posts were just a charade, as Mr. McAfee contends, is impossible to say. But Dr. Paul Earley, an addiction specialist in Atlanta, said that MDPV users commonly rhapsodize about their early experiences, claiming the drug makes them alert, activated and in some cases fantastically randy.

“That’s part of the danger,” Dr. Earley said. “The absence of any apparent side effects lures users into heavier and heavier doses and at some point, for reasons we don’t fully understand, MDPV becomes extremely toxic. Users become psychotic and paranoid. They hallucinate monsters. Often they think the police are after them. That is the classic MDPV profile.”

Mr. McAfee has written on his blog that he has not taken drugs or had a drink since 1983. He told Joshua Davis, a reporter for Wired who has written an e-book about Mr. McAfee, that pre-1983 he had been an alcoholic and a heavy cocaine user — snorting lines in his office at a Santa Clara, Calif., company called Omex and downing a bottle of Scotch a day. He said he was coping with the scars of a terrifying childhood in Roanoke, Va., where he grew up with a father who was an alcoholic who beat him and his mother; the father later committed suicide.

By 1983, Mr. McAfee was worried that he was headed for a similar demise. His wife had split, he had no job and no friends and rarely left his house. Then he entered Alcoholics Anonymous and has been sober ever since.

And not just sober, but an evangelizing teetotaler. He demanded that his employees in Belize abstain, or they’d be fired. “Zero tolerance,” said Herman Wade, who has served as Mr. McAfee’s driver since March. “He heard that I’d had a drink once and he said: ‘I don’t want to hear you were ever drinking again. Smart people don’t drink alcohol.’ That’s a quote. It seemed a little excessive because we’re talking about your free time, but those were his rules.”

WHEN Mr. McAfee argued on his blog that his Bluelight postings were an elaborate prank, he did provide one incontrovertible piece of evidence: his long history of elaborate pranks. They turn up, time and again, in the story of his professional life.

He was working on a voice-recognition program at Lockheed when, in 1987, he founded McAfee Associates out of his home in Santa Clara. If the man was inclined toward paranoia, he’d found the right job; computer virus protection is all about fighting threats that you can’t see coming.

But his chief contribution to the company was marketing the product. He had the idea, revolutionary at the time, to give it away online and earn money through corporate licensing fees. Millions rolled in, but not fast enough for Mr. McAfee. In 1992, the same year the company had gone public, he began hyping the threat of a virus called Michelangelo, contending in television and newspaper interviews that it would waylay millions of computers.

The scare came and went with little notable impact, other than the one it had on the balance sheet of the company (very positive) and the reputation of Mr. McAfee (very negative). He left the company in 1994, having decided that he wasn’t a great manager. His net worth was said to peak at $100 million. In 2010, the company, then known as McAfee Inc., was acquired by Intel for $7.68 billion.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

After his exit, Mr. McAfee’s life entered its eccentric-small-time-entrepreneur phase. He bought a plot of land in Colorado, where he ran a yoga retreat and wrote yoga books. He later acquired property in Rodeo, N.M., , and founded the Southwest Aerotrekking Academy, a school where people learned to fly motorized ultralights that screamed low over the desert at 70 to 80 miles per hour.

When people nearby, in Portal, Ariz., objected to the buzzing of his “Sky Gypsies,” as he called them, he came up with some creative diversions. One was a made-up organization of lesbian bikers, who were said to be on the verge of rumbling into town for an annual meeting. Another was a fabricated paintball group, complete with its own Web site, that was said to be heading to Portal.

“There was a rumor going around and everyone was really upset about it,” said Joan Jensen, who works at Portal’s post office. “We have a lot of environmentalists around here, and none of them wanted a bunch of people playing paintball running around the canyon.”

When the Great Recession hit, Mr. McAfee publicly contended that he was down to his last $4 million, and he showed up in a number of articles, including one in The New York Times, as an example of a superrich guy laid low by the downturn. The stock market drop combined with the collapse of the real estate market, he said, had gobbled up most of this assets. He sold off the aerotrekking school and an assortment of properties in what looked like a fire sale. Then he moved to Belize.

It’s unclear, though, how extensive these losses were. In April 2008, Mr. McAfee was named in a wrongful-death lawsuit by the family of Robert Gilson, a 61-year-old who died in a crash of an aerotrekker piloted by Mr. McAfee’s nephew, who was also killed. Frank Fleming, a lawyer for the Gilson family, says Mr. McAfee might have poor-mouthed his own fortune and left for Belize as part of a legal strategy.

“I think he believes that because the U.S. and Belize don’t have a bilateral treaty a judgment in a U.S. court is worthless in Belize,” Mr. Fleming said in a recent interview. “I don’t think he’s right about that.”

Whatever Mr. McAfee’s reasons or the scale of his wealth, he ended up buying a number of properties on the Belize mainland, as well as the villa in Ambergris Caye, about a few hundred yards north of the home of Gregory Faull.

Mr. McAfee would prove to be a horrible neighbor.

“THIS is not a wallet,” said Jeff Spiegel, tapping something metallic-sounding in a front pocket of his cargo shorts.

A former punk rock label manager with a shaved head, Mr. Spiegel was speaking through mirrored sunglasses. He had just escorted a handful of people out of Mr. Faull’s home and up the beach to the Rojo Lounge, the restaurant he owns and runs with his wife, Vivien Yu. Mr. Spiegel was in the front of the entourage, and a man in military fatigues with a machine gun slung over his shoulder brought up the rear.

In between were the parents and some friends of Mr. Faull. For years, Rojo was his hangout of choice. The group being chaperoned this afternoon — six days after Mr. Faull’s death — was heading to the restaurant’s outdoor bar for an impromptu memorial service.

“When we learned that Greg’s family was coming in, we asked Belize authorities for security,” said Mr. Spiegel, explaining the machine gun. “For the family’s peace of mind and for their privacy.”

Sitting at a table at his restaurant, Mr. Spiegel took a break from his duties as chef to discuss Mr. Faull, mostly, he said, because he is worried that the man will wind up as a footnote in the story of his own death.

“He was the kind of guy who could walk into a bar knowing nobody and leave with a dozen friends,” Mr. Spiegel said.

He refused to say much of anything about Mr. McAfee, other than to describe his residence as the site of “a longstanding, uncomfortable situation.”

“You walk the beach at night and there is somebody holding a shotgun, shining a flashlight in your face, leaning up against a tree,” Mr. Spiegel said. “If you expect it and you live next door, you can just say, ‘Get that lead out of my face.’ If you’re a tourist walking up the beach, it’s incredibly disconcerting.”

Mr. Spiegel was one of the first people on the scene the morning of the crime, and checked the body to make sure that Mr. Faull was dead. He wouldn’t speculate about who committed the murder. But asked if Mr. Faull might have poisoned Mr. McAfee’s dogs, he thought for a moment.

“Here’s how I explained this to his dad,” Mr. Spiegel said. “If indeed he did it, it wasn’t because he was a cruel person, it wasn’t because he was filled with hatred. The only reason he would have done it is if he felt that all avenues existing to address the problem had been exhausted, and there was no government agency that existed or that could intervene. In the same way he was hard-working in other aspects of his life, if this is something he did it was simply because,” and here Mr. Spiegel paused briefly and then spoke as though trying to control his anger, “somebody has to do something, at some point. Does that mean, he did it? No. But did there exist a legitimate problem that wasn’t being addressed? Absolutely.”

He then pointed to one of his legs and two dime-size dark purple marks, about an inch apart — a bite, he said, from one of Mr. McAfee’s dogs.

“That was four years ago,” he added. “I’m sure you can see that this is not some trivial, neighborly” dispute.

THE last two years of Mr. McAfee’s life have been turbulent even by his own standards. As he waited for QuorumEx to produce some breakthroughs, he spent time in a tiny Belizean village called Carmelita, not far from his research lab in Orange Walk. He says he began a volatile relationship there with a young prostitute who helped convince him that the place was riddled with crime and a hub of narco-trafficking. That prompted a one-man, Gary Cooper-style campaign to impose a bit of law and order. Mr. McAfee confronted local thugs. He converted a local brothel into a bar and a family swimming-pool area, christening it Studio 54. He bought a building and outfitted it as a police station, the village’s first.

Many locals say they were a little wary of this crusade, in part because Mr. McAfee hadn’t bothered to ask if they needed the help and in part because they thought Carmelita was hardly the crime-infested swamp that he assumed it to be. The police were initially appreciative but kept a certain distance.

“They never used the police station he built,” said Noel Codd, who manages Studio 54. “They thought it came with strings attached, that John would be involved with the police’s day-to-day affairs.”

Among the police, mistrust hardened into suspicion as Mr. McAfee added more security guards to his compound and as he started to either win over or negotiate truces with local drug dealers.

A rich guy, in the middle of the jungle, with a lab surrounded by a lot of men with weapons, and links to area bad guys: it looked highly suspicious to the Gang Suppression Unit, which in late April raided his compound looking for what it assumed was a meth lab. Mr. McAfee was handcuffed and left to broil in the sun while the G.S.U. collected equipment and shot one of his dogs after it menaced one of the agents. Mr. McAfee was arrested and spent the night in jail, charged with the unlicensed manufacturing of drugs and possession of an unlicensed weapon. The charges were later dropped — the G.S.U. was certain that meth wasn’t being produced in that lab — but the experience seemed to amplify Mr. McAfee’s sense of persecution.

“He had a complex network of informants,” says Chad Essley, an animation director who visited Mr. McAfee a few months ago. “He was constantly on the phone. He would know if a certain boat was coming up the beach.”

Mr. Essley, who lives in Portland, Ore., met Mr. McAfee online, through a private message board where Mr. McAfee had often posted about his life and adventures. After the raid, Mr. Essley wrote to Mr. McAfee to ask if he was all right. Mr. McAfee responded by inviting him to visit, all expenses paid. Mr. Essley went in part because he thought the trip might provide fodder for a graphic novel, now a work in progress called “The Hinterland.”

“I think in a way he needed someone who was outside his reality and who was friendly and wasn’t out for anything,” Mr. Essley said. “I met this woman there named Helen and at some point, either she or John said that they needed someone there to document things that were too crazy for words. And they needed some levity. I wasn’t able to bring any levity, because the situation wasn’t very funny.”

A lot of Mr. McAfee’s time was spent in the arms of one of his girlfriends, Mr. Essley said, or watching DVDs. But there was also a lot of interaction with sketchy types in the area, he said. Mr. Essley never figured out what link they had to Mr. McAfee, though his sense was that they circled him because they knew he was rich.

“Strange people would show up on the beach, asking for jobs,” Mr. Essley recalled. “They’d say: ‘Where is your boss? We want to speak to him.’ I’d take down their phone number and give it to John.”

The real problem, in Mr. McAfee’s own telling, was not these job seekers. In September this year, on the private message board where he met Mr. Essley, he published the first part of what he called “Darkness Falls,” which he said was “a tale of intrigue and deception, involving great risks and dangers.”

Much of the post, which was made public by Gizmodo, is given over to detailed descriptions and photographs of the seven women who, he said, shared his bed. (“And there is Betsy. Betsy hunted me down two years ago to complain that one of my dogs had eaten one of her chickens.”) There are also portents of some scheme involving local gang members and perhaps the government of Belize, though that part of the story is low on particulars. “Simple robbery and murder were the motives of this plot,” he writes, “but in the minds of the perpetrators the gains were expected to be in the millions of dollars — thus the elaborate preparation and the large number of players.” Answers are promised in a Part 2, but that has not been published publicly.

Mr. McAfee seemed to believe that he was in the cross hairs of dangerous and powerful people, and that they were ready to pounce.

One night in October, they did. Or at least Mr. McAfee believed that they did.

A real estate agent in Ambergris Caye named Chris Allnatt woke up at his home the next morning at 5:30 and was amazed to find Mr. McAfee asleep on his balcony, pants soaked with urine. Mr. McAfee had been renting the condo next door, and he later told Wired magazine that he high-tailed it after 30 to 40 police officers and Coast Guard personnel came for him in the middle of the night. He had traversed a narrow ledge, in the dark, 20 feet above the ground to reach Mr. Allnatt’s balcony.

Mr. McAfee would later fall back on his go-to explanation for all bizarre behavior: he was kidding. He contended on his blog that he was merely playing a joke on Mr. Allnatt, who happens to be the agent who sold him that Mata Grande villa. “I was scammed to the max on the deal and merely filed away in my mind that the score should someday be settled in an amicable and amusing (for me) fashion that benefited me in some way,” he wrote.

How showing up asleep on Mr. Allnatt’s balcony is supposed to settle a score, or amuse anyone, is a mystery. But Mr. Allnatt’s version of this episode, you may not be surprised to learn, is a little different. There were no police officers or Coast Guard personnel around that evening, he said. He would have heard them. Also, Mr. Allnatt said he believes that Mr. McAfee “was messed up on drugs.”

“When he woke up, he was all over the place, and later when my wife looked around the balcony, she found a little Ziploc bag filled with gray powder, which he’d hidden among our plants,” Mr. Allnatt said. “I almost considered calling and demanding an apology because we don’t do drugs. I don’t care if others do, but how dare he bring it on our property?” He said he washed the contents of the bag down a drain and would never have discussed it if Mr. McAfee hadn’t told the story to Wired.

Mr. McAfee’s isolation and sense of despair would quickly deepen. About a week before the murder, said Mr. Wade, his driver, he fired his four bodyguards because he thought they were talking to the government. (In their place, he hired a British man.) When Mr. McAfee’s dogs were poisoned, on Friday, Nov. 9, he e-mailed Mr. Davis, the Wired reporter, and wrote that “a contingent of black-suited thugs” had swarmed the beach near his home. “A half-hour later,” he said, “all of my dogs had been poisoned.”

Soon after Mr. Faull was found dead, that Sunday morning, police officers arrived at Mr. McAfee’s house. He would later contend that he eluded them by digging a hole, covering it with a cardboard box and lying still for hours. He accused Belizean authorities of the murder, figuring that they came to kill him and shot the wrong white guy. The government said this was ludicrous.

THE phone rang while I was shaving. “This is John McAfee. I understand you want to talk to me. You’ve got four minutes. This is a third-world country but they can still triangulate a call.”

I had left my number with Mr. Essley and asked him to forward it to Mr. McAfee with a request for an interview. Ten minutes later, the interview had begun. I asked how he was faring, presumably in circumstances that were relatively austere.

“I’m doing fine under the circumstances,” he said. “I’m eating fairly normally. I can survive on bananas, and peanut butter and canned food.”

He sounded assured, serious and determined. There was no hint of the jokester who liked to wear disguises or grab his crotch for photographs.

Does he have any idea who killed his dogs? “The only person I know who didn’t do it is Greg Faull,” he said, “because he loved dogs and people who love dogs don’t kill other people’s dogs.”

I asked if it wasn’t crazy to think that the Belize police would kill him, now that his case had attracted so much media attention.

“I would like to point something out. Research Arthur Young,” he said, referring to a gang leader who was reportedly shot dead by police in April, after he’d been apprehended. “Police were saying, ‘We only want to talk to you.’ They handcuffed his hands behind his back. You know very little about the police and the judicial system here.”

He then theorized that if he turned himself in, the police might well take him into custody and hang him using his pants, making it look like a suicide.

“Come on,” he said, as though talking to a naif. “Get real, sir.”

The call ended. As of late Friday, Mr. McAfee was still evading the 20 police officers and members of the Gang Suppression Unit that are said to be looking for him. He has been tapping out a steady flow of words and updates on his blog, and projecting an air of contented defiance. Recently, he announced that he and Sam had been secreted into the home of a friend and had enjoyed a bath and a cup of coffee.

“Life is good,” he wrote.

To a modest segment of San Pedro, he is a kind of folk hero, outwitting a crooked and feckless government that has failed to provide much in the way of economic opportunity. To others, he’s a tragic case of a superior mind gone haywire. He needs help, they say, and if he is really innocent, he should get it, as soon as possible.

To still others, he’s a publicity seeker, par excellence. Mr. Spiegel, the Rojo Lounge owner, has a simple, low-budget plan to drive him out of hiding. “The police should declare him a person of noninterest,” Mr. Spiegel says. “Soon as they do that, he’ll be knocking on their door.”

Correction: December 9, 2012

A picture caption last Sunday with an article about the founder of a Silicon Valley virus-fighting software company who was sought by the police in Belize in connection with a homicide investigation misspelled his surname. He is John McAfee, not McAfree.

A version of this article appears in print on December 2, 2012, on Page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: Hide-and-Seek in Belize. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe